I was so excited by Llewlyn's completion of her story I just HAD to post this, because this is my favorite chapter so far and I'm really really thrilled by how it came out.
Plus I'm going away for the long weekend so I figured I owed you all SOMETHING.
I would really, really really like to see the line feature fixed eventually. But it's kind of nice to get a small space to rant to my readers.
I've mentioned already that I was a servant and that much is true. And I did live through the plague, through mind you. No one back then could really figure but some people were just spared the torture of having to die like that. I was one of those few.
I worked for an old and wealthy family, big too, five girls and a boy, the parents were a Count and Countess if you can believe, I had done really well for myself. They were a nice family who had some shred of respect for their servants, more than others of the time to say the very least. Anyway, they moved to Italy shortly after I started working for them and like any good servant I followed. The plague hit barely three months after we got there. And only a month after we realized what was happening, the wife and son took ill.
Lydia watched his mouth with rapt attention as he talked. There was a pleasant warmth settling into her bones as she drained her glass. Every time her glass was almost empty, without missing a beat Betelgeuse was already filling it.
He was speaking softly and his lips curled up at the corners, a hidden smile in response to her nearly goofy one.
They died within hours of each other.
He swirled his wine around in his glass and Lydia wondered if she actually heard remorse in his voice.
The boy was just a kid, barely ten if that and the wife was always rather weak and sickly, these days she would've been fine o'course but back then there was barely medicine. The father—a businessman working with the trading companies, was slowly dying too, but that was due to losing his money, with the plague no one wanted to trade with anyone. He did love her, but he knew that he couldn't mourn for too long.
His family was still in danger and he had to protect the ones still alive.
Back in those days we didn't know much about medicine but we could figure out that there was a correlation between being around someone with the plague and getting it yourself. That's why you read about all those families who got sealed into their homes by scared villagers. And the plague doctors, a freaky bunch those! Wonderin' around in those masks crammed full of herbs and incense. They figured right about it being airborne but thought if they filled themselves with the scent of something else they were protected.
You couldn't even get them when you wanted 'em though so it wasn't like they were any help at all other than scaring the hell out of the few little kids still around. That and killing people. Most of their cures you read today did more harm than good, killed people faster than the plague even though in less painful ways so maybe they were a blessing.
Lydia had seen pictures of what the Plague doctors looked like and she had heard about what methods they used. Most of them did nothing, but there was a cure that involved laxitives, trying to get a person to completely clear their system of the disease, and that just served to dehydrate people.
It was the other cure that had always unnerved Lydia, rubbing the patient with mercury—which was dangerous enough but often times not deadly—and then baking them. Putting them in a large oven and heating it up. If the patient survived they went mad from the mercury or wished they were dead because of the burns. Even today burns were difficult to hear.
She couldn't recall how he had talked her into it—or maybe she had suggested it her mind was a little fuzzy. Either way the bottle and their glasses had ended up on the couch, his feet propped up on the table and her body curled against his, her head on his shoulder as she sipped delicately at the endless glass of wine.
No one was talking to anyone and everyone was scared out of their minds. If you wanted spiritual help you were screwed, the kings and queens and popes and cardinals all bolted to places that didn't suffer the plague, hiding away in their huge palaces with enough food to last them as long as they needed.
They treated it as though they were under siege, which I suppose they were.
The Count had enough money and pull left to bring his family out to the remote countryside and he left his five daughters there with a handful of servants and himself.
Things were boring but good for us for a long while. We were lucky and even dared to be happy for almost six months before the youngest daughter got sick.
I never found out what happened to her.
The Count wrapped her in blankets put her in a carriage an disappeared for a few months—which wasn't so odd back then. We didn't have cars or planes or trains, you had to ride or walk and that could take weeks. He came back alone with a different horse and said she had died.
Nothing more.
The histories tell you a lot of things but they fail to mention something unprecedented that happen, I can't imagine that people didn't record it, but they just don't mention it a lot.
All these noblewomen who thought they had it, thought they were going to die of this horrible and painful disease—and a few who just realized how short life could be, they all had their own reasons—started loosening the rigid confines of their life. They actually would take any man handy into their bed, desperate to be free of the constricting rules of society before they kicked off.
He grinned and even before he reached that part in his story she could tell that the daughters of the household had looked to him in helping them with that task. She felt the cold fingers of jealousy twist in the pit of her stomach and gulped at her wine, desperate for it's warmth.
Another daughter contracted pneumonia or something, not the plague, and she died in her sleep with a fever. The youngest was ten and I'm not that sick, but the other two...sixteen and nineteen. I think their names were Mary and Ann, or Elizabeth or something. It doesn't matter.
When the outbreak of the plague was over and we were all brought back into Italy. A lot of women started joining these other fornicators or at least sticking with it and a lot of women took their out where they saw it. The Count still had a lot of pull and he managed to find wealthy husbands for the both of them in countries that hadn't been touched by the plague.
They had a problem now and they took their chance. Can't say I blame them really.
They said I bewitched them, coerced them, forced them.
It was all my fault and if they would testify the Church would restore their virginity, because the Church could do that. So I was caught and tried and they decided to hang me, which was actually a huge public event. None of the other women would come forward, or had survived, or their partners hadn't survived, so I had to be an example for all of them. The church saying "We'll find you eventually!"
He waggled his finger at her, and she merely stared at him, listening to his story. She knew what was coming, but still she mourned for the man who had died to protect the secret of these two girls. Two scared little girls who had just wanted some enjoyment before they died—because at sixteen they were certain they would die.
Never did of course, I was one of a handful of people actually caught and punished.
I was always disappointed, there was this painter there who supposedly painted the scene and got to be vaguely famous, but the painting never caught on, not like the Mona Lisa or anything. Francisco Caravello I think was his name.
Lydia wondered what the painting looked like, she wondered what Betelgeuse had looked like when he was alive, and abscently her fingers lifted to stroke the soft flesh by his ear, trying to picture him as he must have been once. Trying to see the man that two noblewomen had risked their lives for. He started under her touch and stumble in the course of his tale, glancing down at her out of the corner of his eye.
She smiled lazily up at him and tucked her knees against his hip. There was a pleasant buzz filling her body from the wine.
It should have been odd to be curled up against someone who was not breathing and had no beating heart, but it seemed so natural to her. She could hear his voice rumbling in his chest and his arm was draped haphazardly over her shoulders and he was strong and calm and safe.
She could have spent the rest of her life here, in the cool safety of his arm, listening to him tell her stories.
Anyway, before I was hung the Count pressed his ring into my hand as I was lead past them.
He stretched his arms in front of her and pointed to the glittering ring on his finger. She had always wondered about it, and now she touched it, inspected it, and realized how old it was. In the back of her mind she wondered how he had held onto it for so long, and how he had kept it so shinny over the long years.
She wondered why he had kept it, he certainly didn't seem like the nostalgic type, especially since this was from the man that had allowed him to die.
Lydia wondered if Betelgeuse would have turned out differently if he had died differently. She realized that she liked him the way he was, even the parts of him that she should have feared or hated, the part of him where she knew he was using her somehow to free him, she still liked him, every bit of him. And she wouldn't have changed him for anything.
For forgiveness they said. It was tradition when you'd spoken against someone, condemned them to die. The people were supposed to forgive me for my crimes so that when they finally did croak God would welcome them with opened arms because they'd followed all his teachings.
It was his way of apologizing I think. I think he knew very well what had really happened but that his daughters were more important than one servant and so I had to be the one to suffer in their place.
Lydia stopped trailing her fingers over his cheek and looked at him, managing to look serious even though they had nearly finished the bottle and Betelgeuse knew he'd only had a fraction of it. He asked her what she was looking at, wishing she would touch him again, it was a strange sensation but it was more welcomed than this odd and infinite look she had turned on him now.
She told him that she was sorry he had died. She knew that everyone had to die eventually, but he had been killed before his time, and she was sorry for him, and she dropped her head against his shoulder and tucked herself into a small ball of warmth.
It was strange to have her touching him, she was so very warm, like a radiator or something, but that was the odd part, heaters, fires, none of it gave off any heat to a ghost, not even the ghost with the most. And that was where it got very strange.
Mortals weren't supposed to give off heat either. It was through his power that they could touch him, that he was a physical thing, so their heat wasn't supposed to affect him, but he could feel every inch of her pressed against his side, the heat flooding through him all the way to his other side.
He felt himself reluctant to let her go.
Her breath stirring the hair against his neck slowed, and nearly stilled, deep and even and an alert that she had fallen asleep. He regretted not being able to be drunk, but he did snicker at the headache she would have in the morning. Wine wasn't too bad but she'd nearly had the whole bottle herself on an empty stomach. And she was a lightweight he could tell.
What surprised him most was that he wished he could help her with it.
There's a woman in the wallpaper. She wants out! No one believes me! Ugly, ugly yellow wallpaper.
Points to whomever gets that obscure and strange joke... Points, I'm not good at drabbles! I talk too much for that. I don't know what the points are for so if you've an idea for what you wanna redeem your points for whee!
I know it's "hanged" but this is someone speaking and I doubt Beej would get it right you know? Eh. I made up the painter. I was looking through sort of unknown but famous Italian painters but none of them had the style I wanted, so sorry for making one up. Oops. I know I had a closet wine-geek so I hope I don't have closet painter-geeks that I'm injuring:)
